I’m currently in Shanghai for an internal technical conference, which I’m really looking forward to. There are loads of very interesting, deeply technical sessions on the 2-day agenda. I travelled via Beijing, to spend some time with the DevTech China team, yesterday, and will fly back there on Thursday evening to spend time with them on Friday, too. (Monday was a holiday in China – the Dragon Boat Festival – which meant I have to do a lot of flying around to get a couple of days this week in both places.)
There seems to be a storm cloud traveling around high over my head, at the moment. On the way out from Switzerland, a storm over Frankfurt stopped by my flight from Geneva from taking off, just long enough for me to miss my connection onto Beijing. I managed to get a later flight out with Air China (rather than the original with Lufthansa), which stretched the door-to-door time to about 20 hours, but at least I got there more-or-less on time. Flying to Shanghai, last night, I left the office to avoid the rush hour traffic and ended up getting to the airport 3 hours early for my 8pm flight. They managed to get me on the 6pm, instead, but a local storm had us sat on the runway until 8:30pm, anyway. The consolation being the 8pm flight would have been delayed, too, and I did end up talking at great length to a very interesting American who turned out to be distantly related to Ernest Hemingway.
As the allegedly Chinese curse goes, may you live in interesting times. :-)
